This is such an incredible tangled mess at this point, I’m not even sure how to proceed. I got tired of people misidentifying tunicates as trees, so I looked into why it was happening. The taxon in question is a bizarre choice of name for a tunicate genus “Salix”, which obviously is a homonym for the common tree genus. It’s also out of date and needs to be switched to Exostoma (which is unfortunately also a homonym of a fish genus, but that’s a problem for another day). Not being able to normally search for deactivated names complicates matters (I’m not sure what the recommended method is, I typically google search it and find them on mirrors). In this case the curation history didn’t indicate a taxon swap, so I foolishly assumed one hadn’t occurred. Of course history only goes back to 2022. There was a preexisting Exostoma, which I assumed was giving the “An external taxon with name Exostoma and rank genus is already represented in a Taxon Framework Relationship within this Taxon Framework” error. So I went back and (I thought) deleted my recently created Exostoma ianthinum and Exostoma genus and reactivated the old Exostoma, but apparently it just deactived the species and I’m still getting the error. Nothing I do at this point seems to be able to update this framework. I’m at a loss. And this isn’t even the first issue I had with this interface.
First I couldn’t actually enter the correct “Salix” or its number. I could only input the name, which brings up a menu with my target taxon at the end, which is too short for it to appear, with no ability to expand the menu. Why the ability to expand the menu or enter the number isn’t a feature I have no idea. “Search external name providers” just brings up the same list. My only other option is to create a new taxon (which was already done). Inputing any numbers just brings up a “No results for” error. I managed to type in the target genus and it brought up Exostoma (=Salix 861372)", which worked. Apparently I can just do this from the input genus’ edit taxon option, but I didn’t realize this at the time.
Additionally, whoever added the species “Salix ianthinum” misspelled it “Salix ianthina”, so I’m sure that’ll be fun to transfer.
I’m stuck.